Swedish
Book Review is not responsible for the content of external websites.

from In
the Red Queen's Castle

Lars
Jakobson

Translated
and introduced by Neil Smith

Lars
Jakobson was born in 1959 in the city of Lund, and now lives
in Stockholm. He made his literary debut in 1985 with a collection
of stories, Vinterkvarteret (Winter Quarters).

In
the Red Queen’s Castle was nominated for the prestigious
August Prize, and was awarded Aftonbladet’s literary
prize in 2000. It was reviewed in Dagens Nyheter as ”a
book that ought to be read carefully, several times. It
is what it supposes the world to be: multi-dimensional”.

With
In the Red Queen’s Castle,
Lars Jakobson has created a highly detailed and credible
alternative history of the
second half of the twentieth century, one in which the
manned exploration of Mars was begun as early as the 1950s.
Many of the historical details recounted in the novel are
initially familiar, until it becomes apparent that they
are warped versions of events as we know them: Orson Welles’s
masterpiece, for instance, was his film of Heart
of Darkness,
whereas Citizen Kane was never
completed.

The book is constructed of
fragments of the different narrative threads: at its
heart is the story of the narrator
who is clearing out his childhood home in the Swedish province
of Dalarna following the death of his father. Interwoven
with this are the narrator’s childhood reminiscences,
his attempts to write an introduction to a book about the
Martian landings, the story of the excavation of a vast
library on Mars and the ensuing attempts to decipher the
language of the long-extinct Martian civilization. Extracts
from books, and from scientific and ‘historical’ documents
appear throughout the novel, as do letters sent to the
narrator by his elusive friend Doug.

In the Red Queen’s
Castle is a complex narrative
that deserves to be read on many levels. It has clear points
of contact with the author’s previous novel, The
Canal-Builders’ Children, but also with Ray Bradbury’s
Martian Chronicles, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian
series, as well as Alice in Wonderland and Harry Martinson’s
space-epic Aniara. But at its heart is the very human story
of the relationship between a father and a son.

Previous
books include:

Menagerie (Menagerie,
1989)

Pumpan (The
Pump, 1991)

Hemsökelser (Visitations,
1994)

Kanalbyggarnas barn (The
Canal-Builders' Children, 1997, also published in Norwegian,
Danish and German)